William Henry Drummond Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Henry Drummond

Among minor Canadian poets who during their lifetime enjoyed unusually high reputations, William Henry Drummond is perhaps foremost. While he had a natural talent for composing French-Canadian dialect verse, he became a public and published poet more in response to the desires of his friends and (eventually) his readers than in response to any personal desire for notoriety. Yet at the turn of the century and during the years leading up to World War I he was extremely popular, not only in Canada but also in England and the United States. He made few demands on his readers, who found his poems amusing, witty, and original. If today Drummond's verse seems little more than a literary and historical curiosity, it is mainly because the community spirit that the poet and his audience shared has been diluted over the years. Arthur Phelps's 1959 remark that "Drummond today is discard material only among the undiscerning" now seems a comment more on readers' powers of discernment than on the permanent value of Drummond's verse.

Born in County Leitrim, Ireland, on 13 April 1854, Drummond spent the first ten years of his life in and around the villages of Mohill and Tawley, then immigrated to Canada with his parents (Elizabeth Morris Loden and George Drummond) just three years' before the country's confederation in 1867. Despite the promises of a new land, misfortune quickly struck. Within six months of their arrival Drummond's normally hardy Royal Irish Constabulary father lay dead, and his mother was faced with the prospect of bringing up Drummond and his three brothers alone, which she proceeded to do according to simple but high Christian standards. In order to help support the family Drummond withdrew from high school, training and working as a telegrapher in Bord-à-Plouffe, a Quebec lumber town where he had his first encounters with the habitants and voyageurs who were to inspire (and even to preoccupy) the poet. He would come to be known affectionately as the "Poet of the Habitant."

From one of his Bord-à-Plouffe acquaintances Drummond heard the story of "The Wreck of the 'Julie Plante,'" which was the source of the famous poem that was to appear in his first volume, The Habitant, and Other French-Canadian Poems (1897): "On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,/De win' she blow, blow, blow,/An' de crew of de wood scow 'Julie Plante'/Got scar't and run below...." In the twenty years between the time he recorded the tale and the time he published the poem, Drummond pursued his education and his profession, returning to Montreal High School after several years in telegraphy, and then advancing to McGill College in Montreal and to Bishop's Medical College in Lennoxville, from which he graduated in 1884 with an M.D. His first professional appointment was as house surgeon at Montreal's Western Hospital, a position he held briefly until establishing a practice as a private physician at Stornoway and later at Knowlton (1884-1888). Another poem from his first collection,"Ole Docteur Fiset," is very much a self-portrait: "Let her rain or snow, all he want to know/Is jus' if anywan's feelin' sick,/For Docteur Fiset's de old fashion kin'/Doin' good was de only t'ing on hees min'/So he got no use for de politique." In 1888 Drummond returned to Montreal and resumed his role as a dedicated physician and an amateur poet. His life began to change dramatically in 1892, when he met Dr. O. C. Harvey and his daughter May Isabel, who were visiting from the West Indies. In the spring of the following year Drummond traveled to Jamaica, where he and May became engaged; they were married on 18 April 1894 at Savanna le Mar, also in Jamaica.

During his stay in the Caribbean he realized the importance of the rhythms and cadences of dialect to his own self-styled French-Canadian patois, just as later, in 1902, he would become fascinated with Celtic and Anglo-Saxon speech patterns while on an otherwise unsatisfying trip to England, Scotland, and Ireland. By that time Drummond had for several years held the Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at Bishop's College, had been enrolled as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature of England and as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1899), had had an LL.D. conferred upon him by the University of Toronto (1902), and had published--largely through his wife's encouragement, since he had preferred to compose his verse for private readings--three internationally popular volumes of poetry: The Habitant, and Other French-Canadian Poems, Phil-o-rum's Canoe, and Madeleine Verchères (1898), and Johnnie Courteau, and Other Poems (1901).

The initial success of these works is attributable in part to the endorsement Drummond received from Louis Fréchette, a French-Canadian poet and politician (1839-1908), who in his introduction to The Habitant, and Other French-Canadian Poems passed on a compliment that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had paid to Drummond, calling him "The pathfinder of a new land of song." With Fréchette's assurances that Drummond was celebrating rather than mocking them and their language, Quebecois whole-heartedly supported his verse. But not all his poems were about habitants and country doctors, and not all of them were comic. Drummond wrote"Le Vieux Temps"(The Old Times, 1895) during his wife's convalescence following the death of their first child several hours after birth. His comforting tone as he invites her near is typical of many of his poems: "Venez ici, mon cher ami, an' sit down by me--so/An' I will tole you story of old tam long ago/W'en ev'ryt'ing is happy--w'en all de bird is sing."

At the first Christmas after another tragedy, the death of his three-year-old son, William Henry, in 1904, Drummond composed"The Last Portage," a poem about the passage from life to death, which, appropriately, appeared in his last published collection. The Voyageur and Other Poems (1905) is the least original and impressive of the four volumes published during his lifetime, because Drummond tends to take the lively verse of such earlier poems as his famous "Little Bateese"--"You bad leetle boy, not moche you care/How busy you're kipin' your poor gran'-pere"--and to rework it slightly to suit new characters, as in "Dominique": "You dunno ma leetle boy Domi nique"/Never see heem runnin' roun' about de place""

Shortly after the publication of The Voyageur and Other Poems Drummond and his brothers undertook the supervision of the Drummond Mines operation at Kerr Lake in the Cobalt district of northern Ontario. However, in the spring of 1907 Drummond fell victim to fatigue while fighting an outbreak of smallpox, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died on 6 April. Appearing posthumously were The Great Fight: Poems and Sketches (1908), consisting of previously unpublished poems and fragments, edited and with a biographical portrait by his widow, May Harvey Drummond, and The Poetical Works of William Henry Drummond (1912), comprising the poet's collected verse, an introduction by Fréchette, and a laudatory sketch by Drummond's friend and favorite novelist, the Scotsman Neil Munro.

William Henry Drummond is much more than a literary anachronism, though some recent criticism has seriously questioned the political presumptions that underlie such dialect verse. In any event, his sincere attempt to use language as a liaison between Canada's two founding cultures, who were separated principally by language itself, seems to have presaged everything from Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes (1945) to Canadian literatures in translation.